California in Recession (?)

That’s the almost gleeful conclusion in an article in the Washington Examiner last December. Now, it’s true they based that conclusion on a Legislative Analyst’s Office report. However, that conclusion was based on the (inappropriate) use of the (national level) Sahm rule to state level unemployment rates. And as Dr. Sahm has remarked, this is not the right way to go — rather one needs to examine the appropriate threshold for a given state before using it to infer a recession.

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Almost landed

The Bureau of Economic Analysis announced today that seasonally adjusted U.S. real GDP grew at a 1.6% annual rate in the first quarter. That’s a little lower than many analysts expected. But the year-over-year growth is still on track.

Top panel: quarterly real GDP growth at an annual rate, 1947:Q2-2024:Q1, with the historical average (3.1%) in blue. Calculated as 400 times the difference in the natural log of real GDP from the previous quarter. Bottom panel: year-over-year growth rate. Calculated as 100 times the difference in the natural log of real GDP from the same quarter of the previous year.

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